Creator: Institute for Postnatural Studies.
Location: Madrid (España).
Compost Reader.
In the 19th century, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch made microbes visible for the first time to the human eye. As pathogens were found to be the direct cause of certain diseases, design gained a new relevance as a form of preventive medicine. Sterilization, both as a set of laboratory practices and a collective imaginary, became a model for the design of spaces for the colonial enterprise and, in hand with the Hygienist movement, for the European metropolis. Domestic spaces in particular became the battlefield where the war against microbes was waged, as the 1884 London Health Exhibition shows.
This video-essay traces the relations between hygiene, microbes and domestic design through the concept of sterilization, shifting from a one-sided concern with human health to a postnatural perspective in which relationships between species come to the fore. To achieve a post-anthropocentric approach towards contemporary design, we propose looking at contemporary philosophers and scientists such as Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing and Lynn Margulis, to stop perceiving microorganisms as a threat in design, and instead, see them as our allies for interdisciplinary
practices of co-designing.
